Ashes to Ashes
by starryeyedx3
Summary: In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die. Where you invest your love, you invest your life. Godric/OC
1. I

_Disclaimer:_ I own nothing. Sadly.

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First things first, this is not a love story. It is my story and I did fall in love, but after everything was over and had fallen apart, in the end I realised that love just wasn't enough. But for memory's sake, I'll start at the beginning.

I've always known that I was different. Not just because of gawks I received from strangers in our small town as I walked past hand in hand with my flaxen haired, blue eyed parents, when I had been born with dark skin and dark eyes. I was adopted as a baby when my parents were still living in New York City. My mother would explain when I was bordering on adolescence that she never wanted to raise a child in the city and shortly moved to Texas, terrified that I would fall in with the wrong crowd or get mugged or shot or, God forbid, have some sort of open creative expression in a city with some of the best art schools in the country. As long as I can remember I was used to feeling out of place but not just for those reasons.

I never got sick, I never bruised my knees when I fell off my bike. People used to joke that I had an immune system made of steel or must have been born a bionic kid. And I never really thought much about it until one day, when I was fifteen, I died. And I don't mean the kind of near death experiences you hear about on TV when kids fall into a river or get caught in a rip current and they end up trapped under water for a whole six minutes and then miraculously rescued and resuscitated.

I was dead. Fully dead. Corpse on a slab in a morgue dead. And then I wasn't.

I woke up right after what I assumed to be my own autopsy, staring down at gashes on my chest from incisions and only a thin sheet over my body to preserve any modesty. I remember I was alone when I woke up, I guess because they weren't finished with me, but before anyone came back I grabbed a set of medical scrubs from a counter and ran home before my parents realised I wasn't tucked away in bed. I don't know how and I don't know why, but I knew then that there was something indisputably wrong with me.

For years I kept my secrets to myself and in the mean time avoided any potentially dangerous situations or sharp objects. "Cleo, don't be so reclusive. You're too young to be so shy," my friends would tell me.

I never told anyone about the morgue incident, not my parents, not my friends. I remember being so scared that someone would put the pieces together so I hid it from everyone and eventually it just became easier to pretend that it never happened. I let everyone carry on thinking I was the bionic girl who never got sick or broke any bones and I was perfectly happy living like that.

But everything started the summer I finished high school, when I was on the verge of nineteen and waking up to the real world and all its noise. I was on the train home one moonless night from an art class I was still paying for in Dallas because my parents thought I was wasting my time and refused to fuel any of my "odd notions."

I was sitting by the window scrubbing the dried oil paint from my fingers with obscure, angsty music blaring in my ears, hardly paying any attention to the handful of passengers remaining let alone the few who climbed aboard at one of the first few stops. After a while I noticed that they sat together in a group and I could see them turn to each other to exchange glances and sometimes speak, which all sounds pretty normal, except for the way everyone else was looking at them. I gradually reduced the volume of my music because they weren't sitting that far from me and I was curious, I thought I might be able to catch snippets of their conversation.

I began to take note that the group of people all looked like they were in their early twenties, and they would glance around with these weird, uncomfortable smiles. I counted six of them, two women and four men. There was an old man in a seat ahead who hadn't taken his eyes off them since they arrived and after a while one of the women shouted over to him, "You got something to say, old man?"

I could have sworn I saw apprehension flicker in his eyes. "You people, you destroy everything!" he shouted back in a sad, pained voice, "you should be ashamed."

And the others burst into laughter, but the kind that was just for the sake of being hurtful. After a while of this, the tension in the air turned particularly sinister and all eyes were glued to the group. One of the men rose from his seat and kept his head down as he made his way to an empty seat in the back. I watched him as he passed me by but he didn't meet my eyes.

I looked ahead and pretended it didn't bother me, but when I did I locked eyes on another who had turned around in his seat to watch me. He smirked and flashed his teeth, two long white spikes of enamel on either end of his mouth. I stared down at my hands like I hadn't seen, my heart hammering away at the revelation. I had only ever met one vampire before that night, and it was very brief and I was sure I hadn't made a lasting impression.

Some of the others started to change seats, spreading around the train like they were covering ground. The train swerved around a sharp bend and I had to grip the seat ahead of me to steady myself. I pulled the earphones out of my ears because I realised they weren't fooling anyone anymore and watched them so carefully I didn't dare blink, as if just by watching them close enough I could ensure that nothing bad would happen. When they had every corner and every door guarded, I think everyone realised that something awful was going to happen. I know I did.

It happened so fast. There were cold hands on my skin and there was growling and hissing in my ears. I barely remember screaming but I know that the others did. They moved so fast I couldn't keep up with their movements, and one of them must have smashed the lights because I remember they started to flicker and eventually everything went dark. And then there was only teeth and nails, blood and torn skin. At first the pain was overwhelming, like battery acid poured on broken skin. And the screaming, the screaming was the worst of it. The sound of strangers begging for their lives and choking on their own blood.

I don't know what happened after that. I only remember a raspy feeling in my throat and thinking about how much I wanted to cough to get rid of it, and then hearing voices very faintly off in the distance. But my mind was sluggish and slow to process words that passed me by.

"It's a goddamn mess. I'll need more time to dispose of the bodies."

"Have you contained those responsible?" Came a stern voice.

"I don't give a shit who was responsible. It was bad enough having to glamour the station master who found them. The humans would come after us with pitchforks if this reaches the press."

"It will not come to that. The public will not find out about this." The speaker was guy as far as I could tell.

"Then clean it up, Sheriff. This is your jurisdiction, not mine." There was a clinking sound like the heels of high shoes walking away, and then there was silence.

I wanted to scratch my neck, my arms, my face, but I couldn't move my hands, I couldn't even open my eyes. I couldn't tell if I was alone, nobody was speaking anymore. Slowly, the numb feeling in my fingertips evaporated and I could feel something slick and oily underneath me and all over me.

My breath came back to me in a rush but made me splutter and cough up whatever was stuck my throat. I opened my eyes and for a brief moment everything was hazy. And then I saw him. He was standing over me with dark crimson flecks were sprayed on his shirt and I realised it was my own blood that I was still coughing up. His jaw was locked tight in an expression as close to shock as it was going to get. Chiselled features, light eyes, lips parting as if her were going to speak. Two shimmering fangs grazed his bottom lip and if I could have ran, I would have.

Only one person has witnessed my coming back to life and they turned out to be a vampire.

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**A/N:** New story? I started writing this as a sort of exercise for my writer's block. My head was just swimming with ideas lately and I had to just get it out. And there can never be enough Godric centred fics, I feel. Reviews would be great, let me know what you think!


	2. II

"What _are_ you?"

That was the very first thing he ever said to me and I'll never forget the way his voice sounded. Not unkind, but guarded and withheld. It made me want to cry. I'd never thought of myself as a _what_ and not a _who_, a thing, not a person.

I couldn't answer him. Not when my heart was fluttering fresh and new again, and my limbs tingled with pins and needles from unused movement. My mind kept jumping to focus on stupid, trivial things like what that raspy bellowing noise was in my ears, or wondering how he would get the dark blood splatters out of his clothes, or how I was sure that if I mixed a number of paint tubes in an array of aquamarine with just enough jade, perhaps a little grey for balance, I could get the exact shade of his eyes.

Fortunately he didn't press the issue any further, maybe because he realised in my current condition he wasn't going to have much luck with an inquisition. His fangs were gone and already he looked dramatically less threatening. I moved to sit myself up and felt cold air on patches of my skin that I couldn't make sense of because I was soaked in slimy blood underneath me and all over me. It wasn't until he draped fabric around my shoulders that I became aware of the full extent of how tattered my clothes had become. But I wasn't in much of a mood to worry about my own nudity or what state I was in.

He leaned closer to say something that I couldn't quite focus on. All I really heard was _forget_, _forget_. "You never came here, you're going to forget."

And he was staring at me unblinking. I stared back because I wasn't sure what he expected me to do, like there was some secret code I was missing out on. Then he frowned, quickly regained his composure and without breaking eye contact gripped the sides of my face so that I couldn't look away. He said it again. "You were never here on this train. You're going to forget everything you witnessed. You will go home and carry on as normal."

Whatever he had been waiting to happen, never happened. No puff of smoke, no twinkling lights. So he edged backwards, moving slowly, and helped me get to my feet. I was growing more conscious of where I was and what had happened, and the urge to run was rising faster than I knew what to do with it. He held onto my arm but I wasn't sure if it was because my face gave away my panic or if he was afraid I would fall and slip in the bloody puddles.

My fingers found the edge of the fabric covering me, something I realised was a jacket, his jacket. And by the time he was walking me forward with an iron grip around my shoulders, which ended up more of a firm push to get my feet to move, I realised what a mess everything was.

I kept my head down and my eyes glued to my feet and to everything under my feet, mostly because I didn't want to look up and create a memory that I knew would never truly leave me. Glass crunched as I treaded through, sidestepping limbs and fluids and ruined clothing so carelessly strewn about and cutting across my path. We passed row after row of seats until he stopped at the carriage doors. One step outside and reality came flooding back. The wind whipped my wet face and my wet clothes, and I stifled a shiver, tilted my head to shield myself.

Distant, but somewhere nearby, I could hear the screech of brakes on steel tracks and the low murmur of announcements on overhead speakers. He held on to me tighter, guiding me hastily to someplace specific across the platform. Soon the fumes in the air disappeared and I was somewhere sheltered from the wind. The bathroom. He let go of me and moved around me. I didn't watch, I didn't do much of anything.

I heard the tap begin to run. He dabbed at my face with wet tissue, trying to scrub away blood that had dried and stained my skin, gotten clumped in my hair. I was sure he had asked me something but it I couldn't make sense of it. The words felt like they were floating past me, just out of my grasp.

I began to think of my mother, what she would say if she saw me like this. I imagined the look in her eyes and it stung something in my chest. I was abruptly reminded of the times when she used to bring me to piano lessons, and although it was something I had once begged for I hated being dragged out to see old Mrs Kushnir who said things in Ukrainian when I got notes wrong and gave me funny tasting tea at the end of the lesson when I got them right. I told my mother I wanted to quit in the car one day and she went quiet and got this look on her face, something between disappointment and a determination to change my mind.

She had said without looking at me that I could quit if it was something I really wanted but it would be a waste. A waste of all of this time, a waste of money, and a waste of talent. She told me that Mrs Kushnir always said I had 'Piano fingers,' and I knew it was true because the old lady would tell me when I waited in her living room with tea and cookies for my mother to pick me up. And that day in the car I hated seeing that look on her face, and even more seeing that she was right. I crossed my arms and lamented back and forth that I was sick of it and sick of the long drive to her house. And my mother turned to me, smiling, and said: "Nothing worth having ever comes easy." Because she knew that would convince me.

The notion of my mother discovering my grim demise, after all of those piano lessons and fights about art school, the thought of my parents planning my funeral and delivering speeches and picking flowers, struck me and made my eyes well up. Much to my humiliation, I realised I was going to cry.

Tears welled up and stung my eyes. I couldn't be sure whether or not they were dribbling down my face but nevertheless I was started to feel like a watercolour painting, made of saltwater that was running colours down my face. He stopped dabbing. It wasn't the kind of hysterical crying, it was the kind that got stuck in my throat and hit me in waves, made my breathing ragged and uneven. it was noticeable but reasonable discreet.

I was reminded of parties that I've been to, when I would see girls in the kitchen drunk and balling their eyes out no matter how much their friends tried to comfort them. They cried over silly things, boys and rumours and lost shoes. But they had already drank so much that they didn't care what the subject matter was, they didn't care who saw. I used to think secretly how pathetic they were revealing themselves like that in front of everyone. And I realised that now that I was no better, and he would think the same as I had. Vulnerable and exposed and pathetic.

"You are not hurt." Came his statement.

I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. I've never had to explain this kind of thing to anyone before, least of all a complete and utter stranger.

"If you wish to see a hospital to check for internal injuries…" he began.

"No!" I cut him off. "No hospitals."

He observed my outburst curiously before he nodded. "Alright." He spoke in a tone I'm sure was intended to calm me down. He dropped the scarlet mound of tissue into a bin underneath the sink and let the water run so that he could clean his hands.

"I have to go home." I realised suddenly. "I have to go home," I said the words like they were the answer to all my problems, like they would fix everything. I made for the door but he blocked my path.

"Child, you cannot go anywhere in this condition." And of course he was right. I was bloodstained and frightening and there was only so much a spare jacket could do for my appearance. Again, he tried to coerce me into co-operation. "Who are you?"

"No one." It just slipped out.

"What is your name?" he pushed.

I became hushed. I looked at his face the same way I did a model in life drawing, noticed the lines, tried to memorise the structure of his face and the way the flesh hung as if I were going to put it to paper.

"Very well. You do not have to reveal anything about yourself that you do not wish to, though it would help. I can take you wherever it is you need to go, but you must leave this place unnoticed, without a word to anyone. You must forget this ever happened, do you understand?"

I nodded. The sternness to his tone surprised me. I understood my own reasons for wanting to leave without gathering attention, my own humiliation, but not his. I was getting the sense that nobody was supposed to survive what occurred on the train to tell a doctor or a detective or anyone. I suppose I found a loophole.

I was as clean as I was going to get in a train station toilet, and when he went towards the door to leave he put his arm around me as he had before. Something I thought odd because I was fine on my feet now and I wasn't planning on running off.

"Keep your head down," he whispered, clutching me closer, tighter. It made me nervous. He lead me off the platform and towards a street I recognised. I often made the walk home from the train station, it wasn't very far.

"Sir!" A girl with jet black hair and the palest eyes I've ever seen was standing in front of me. He halted as she looked at him giddily. I could see that she was a vampire because her skin was light as milk, too light. "Sir, I'm so glad I found you. My maker would like me to thank you…" She glanced down at me suddenly and caught me looking. Her smile dropped.

"Clarice, your thanks is already enough."

"Who's that?" she asked.

"No one," he used my words from earlier. "Return to your maker."

Her smile slipped back into place, almost like relief. "Oh, I get it. You got hungry."

The suggestion made my stomach churn. He said nothing in return, only held his expression in a way to ease her. She soon went on her way, waving and offering more goodbyes and thanks in a remarkably cheery manner. I wanted to run but he held me back firmly so I stayed at his slow pace, which I realised was a much better way to avoid suspicion especially if that girl was still watching nearby.

It abruptly made sense why he was gripping me so close, because he didn't want me to be seen, particularly not by someone who knew him. The girl's words still resonated with me. This whole situation could turn incredibly dangerous for me in a heartbeat. It was a huge leap of faith, faith that I didn't have. I glanced up at him but even though I knew he knew, he didn't return it.

He said quietly, "I do not expect you to feel safe. I do, however, expect you to cooperate, whatever happens. For both of our sakes."

"Safety is an illusion." I told him without thinking. "We create our own."

He took me to a car parked on the street, black and shiny in the moonlight. He left me at the passenger door while he went for the driver's side, and as he passed me by, he whispered, "You will not be harmed." An attempt to prove it wouldn't be by his hand, at least.

But didn't he mean I _can't_ be harmed? There was a feeling of dread gnawing at my insides and I couldn't tell if it was because of the fact that my body was dead barely an hour ago or all of those fables my mother used to tell me about getting in cars with strangers. I slowly wished that I had taken a taxi. But tentatively climbed inside because it wasn't like I had a whole lot of other choices.

"Where do you need to go?" He meant directions to my house, which felt like a much bigger deal than I was comfortable with. I paused. Then I gave him a street name.

"Hamilton Street." I didn't have to say anything more, he already seemed to know his way.

I watched the night sky through the window, passing streetlights and apartment buildings until we reached a more familiar side of town with cherry blossoms and white picket fences. The ride, until this point, had remained silent.

I didn't look at him when I said the words regretfully. "You didn't have to do this you know. Drive me home."

But I could feel his stare burning the back of my head. "Yes, I did," he said.

Did he feel like he had some kind of obligation to me? Or was he naturally just like this?

"But won't you get into trouble, because of me?" I asked.

"If someone were to uncover the truth, there would be consequences, yes. But the main focus would not be on myself. What occurred on the train tonight was a terrible ordeal and it was unfortunate to have happened to you. But what you did, it surprised me, and I am not often surprised." I rested my head against my hand. He spoke about it, about me, reverently. For a reason I couldn't quite figure, that bothered me.

"You're going to tell people now, aren't you."

"Who would I tell?"

"Doctors. Cops. My parents. National Geographic?" My voice was growing desperate. I thought I heard him laugh under his breath. With a sudden rage bubbling, I snapped my head in his direction and saw him almost smiling as he stared through the windscreen.

"If I had intended to tell people what I had seen I would not have snuck you out."

"Then why did you?"

"Because I thought the incident on the train itself was enough for one day. Why give you more cause for grievance."

That response, I hadn't expected. I tried to study him for a fault or any trace of a lie, but I couldn't tell. Or I just wasn't very good at looking for it.

"I apologise if I frightened you," he said after a while, "when I found you, I wasn't expecting to find..."

"A dead girl with a heartbeat?" I answered dully.

"It was magnificent."

It wasn't. It was a freakshow. I am a fucking freak and, worse, I know it. When he said those words it made me want to run, as far and as fast as I could. I had never wanted anyone to know these things about me, they would look at me differently, talk to me differently. And he was looking at me like no one ever had, curious and overwhelming.

We arrived at a neighbourhood I didn't recognise. He announced that he had taken me to Hamilton Street, and he didn't push to try to find out which house it was, either. Guilt was tugging at me. I blurted out, admitting, "I don't live on Hamilton. I live on Greenwood Drive."

He looked amused, like he had thought so all along but was waiting for me to say so. "Greenwood it is." He shifted the car into gear and took me there. I knew the drive would be barely minutes, if that. And there was still something I wanted to tell him just in case I never got the chance again.

"My name is Cleo." His eyes were on me. "I just wanted you to know that."

My house was a three bedroom, two story with a wide front porch and a low-pitched roof, that was just close enough to the suburbs to be referred to as suburban. The curtains of my parents bedroom upstairs were still drawn, they weren't awake yet. Good.

I turned to him. "Thank you."

He didn't say anything back, just looked at me for a moment. I smiled at him before I climbed out and shut the door behind me. I didn't look back because I hadn't heard him drive away yet. I think he was watching me.

I went to the back door because I knew it would be considerably quieter than the front. I took the hideaway key from the soil of a flowerpot, lodged it in the keyhole, twisted it, and let myself in. I made it to my bedroom unnoticed, turned the light on in the adjoining bathroom so that everything glowed yellow, then turned it off again because I found it much too bright. I ran a bath, peeled off my clothes while I waited for it to fill. Soaking in the hot water I found myself grounded to reality and the full extent of what happened to me sank in. I ran my fingers along my neck, my ribs, my non-existent injuries that left behind smooth, untouched skin. Not even a bruise.

My fingers trail a Y shape along my chest from memory, marking out where once I had been cut open in neat, surgical slices. I recalled the vivid smell of blood in my nose, the bone deep incisions, the way the inside of me had looked and how I had tried to piece myself back together. I dipped my head under the water to shake away the memory but I knew that would only work temporarily. There were no visible reminders of that day left on my body but it burned just as fresh. Thinking again about the train, I'm glad I didn't look at the carnage left behind.

When the time came to crawl out of the bath and drain the water, I realised that there was still a faint dark red residue, and I went about scrubbing at it in a panic. And then there was the drops of blood on the floor from my destroyed clothes, the smear on the sink where I brushed against it. I scrubbed it away until it shone. I wasn't sure what to do with the pile of clothes. I decided burning them would be the only way to ensure nobody came across them, but because I couldn't do that right now I settled for tying them into a plastic bin liner, and another one over that, and another over than, just to be sure.

It wasn't until I had hidden it away in the back of the cupboard under the sink that I realised I was still holding onto something that didn't belong to me. His jacket. It was lying on my bedroom floor. It wasn't as badly stained as my own clothes. I considered throwing it into the washing machine when my parents weren't looking so that I could give it back to him.

I'm not sure why I assumed I would get the opportunity, though. It just struck me as natural as seeing the blank canvases I kept in my closet, or the tree shaking outside my upstairs window. When I thought about it again it seemed doubtful. He hadn't even told me his name, with that in mind it seemed unlikely that he would return just to reclaim an item of clothing.

Once again I was exactly what everyone expected me to be. Normal. Or at least trying to be. I've learned that normality, much like piano lessons, was indeed worth having but for me did not come easily.

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**A/N:** This is basically my go to when writing my other stories starts to feel like pulling teeth. It's quite therapeutic really. Also, I changed the rating to M due to the content of future chapters, hope that's alright. It's nothing too bad.

To answer guest reviewer Crys, yes this is all set pre-church. I'm not sure if I should introduce the fellowship plot at all because honestly I'm kind of tired writing about it and I'm sure you are tried reading about it. So maybe something fresh for this story?

Thank you for the very generous reviews left on the previous chapter! I didn't expect much of a response, it's really nice to hear.


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